The Big Cognitive Bias Infographic

This cognitive bias infographic shows you all the different mental mistakes you are prone to making in your daily work and personal life.- that’s a lot!

A cognitive bias is an error in our thinking that affects the decisions and judgments we make. Some of these biases are related to memory, others to what we perceive and others to how and what we pay attention to in the world around us. Needless to say, subtle biases creep in and influence the way we see and think about the world. These biases then affect our decisions including how we assess risk and uncertainty – two key elements when thinking about an idea for a startup.

List of Cognitive Bias Infographic

The human brain is capable of incredible things, but it’s also extremely flawed at times.

Science has produced a lot of research to show that we all make mistakes, called “cognitive biases”, that affect both our thinking and subsequent actions. Presented with a set of information, biases can affect what pieces of information we use as well as taking information from wrong sources. In essence, our cognitive biases reinforce our existing beliefs and fail to then learn contradictory new information.

Cognitive biases can also have a huge impact effect on entrepreneurial endeavours, investments, as well as our personal life. For this reason, this infographic from DesignHacks.co is particularly useful. It shows and groups each of the 188 known biases in existence.

The types of cognitive bias infographic

You can see from the cognitive bias infographic that humans think in certain ways that lead to systematically making rational judgments.

These tendencies usually arise from:

Information processing shortcuts

The limited processing ability of the brain

Emotional and moral motivations

Distortions in storing and retrieving memories

Social influence

Cognitive biases have been studied for decades by academics in the fields of cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioural economics. However, they are especially relevant in today’s information-packed world where we are information rich but time poor.

They influence the way we think and act, and such irrational mental shortcuts lead to all kinds of problems in entrepreneurship, investing and of course management.

A full list of cognitive biases

The cognitive bias infographic doesn’t give you much detail. If you’re like me and you want to look into things in more detail then the best place is Wikipedia. I’ve spent many years referencing Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases whenever I intuitively hit upon a certain way of thinking is a bias, but I can’t recall the name or details. It’s an invaluable reference for helping me identify the hidden flaws in my own thinking. It’s the best and probably the most comprehensive list of cognitive biases.